Change for Good

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Testing Peers podcast. This time, join Chris Armstrong, Rachel Kibler, Tara Walton, and Russell Craxford discussing what it means to create change in teams that are worn down, frustrated, or stuck in longstanding patterns. 

In this episode, the Peers talk frame the discussion around practical reflections on joining difficult team contexts, building agency, identifying friction, and shaping improvements that matter without creating burnout.

The group focuses on the difference between technical problems and people or adaptive challenges, the value of curiosity and influence, and the power of small, intentional actions that reduce unnecessary friction and build momentum toward better ways of working.

Key themes and ideas

Teams with history and fatigue

Teams carry context, history, and stories long before new people arrive. What looks like dysfunction to a newcomer may be normalised pain to those who have lived with it. Past failed efforts at change often create deep scepticism.

The “WTF list”

Rachel introduces the idea of keeping a personal “WTF list” when joining a new team. This is a record of things that confuse, frustrate, or cause unnecessary pain. It is a tool for reflection, learning what to ask about, and identifying areas for low effort improvements while separating technical fixes from people or adaptive challenges. Some items are best kept for private reflection or manager conversations rather than shared openly.

Technical problems versus people problems

Technical problems usually have known solutions and can be addressed with the right expertise. People problems require influence, trust, and time. Effective change begins by asking why things are done the way they are before assuming what should be done.

The risk of bonding over complaints

Shared frustration can bond people quickly, "trauma bonding", but venting without action often leads to stagnation. Reflection and curiosity help teams ask what could realistically be done differently next time.

Context before action

Change attempts fail when history, constraints, or social dynamics are ignored. Newcomers often see pain points that existing teams have normalised. Without understanding the background, even good ideas can trigger resistance.

Agency, choice, and acceptance

Sometimes, change is not possible in the short term. Actively choosing to accept a situation can be more empowering than feeling trapped by it. Doing nothing can be valid when it is a conscious decision rather than passive resignation.

Small wins and incremental change

Not every improvement has to be dramatic. Small changes that remove friction can build trust and momentum over time. Cultural shifts often start with fixing minor but irritating problems rather than attempting wholesale transformation.

Positivity and recognising progress

Testing roles are often framed negatively, both by others and by the people doing the work. Creating space to acknowledge progress and success helps rebalance that narrative and improves team morale.

Leadership and advocacy

Leadership involves passing feedback upwards and advocating for change even when the leader cannot fix the problem directly. Choosing where to invest influence is an important leadership skill.

Takeaways

• You cannot change everything from every position.
• Context and history matter more than frameworks.
• Influence is more effective than instruction in people-related challenges.
• Small, deliberate improvements build momentum for bigger shifts.
• Conscious acceptance is still a form of agency.

Recommended Reading

Your Leadership Edge by Ed O’Malley and Amanda Cebula

A practical guide to the competencies and mindset requir

Transcript

 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Testing Peers podcast. My name is Chris Armstrong, and today I am joined by Rachel Kibler. Howdy, Tara Walton. Hello and the great Russell Cranford. Hello. The not so great.

Well, I think you're great. This week we are going to be talking about change for good and we'll get a little bit more into what we mean by that in a wee bit. But Rachel has for us some over to you, Rachel. Okay, so if you are asked to bring a side dish to a potluck and you know nothing about anyone else who's going to this potluck, what are you bringing?

The first question? What's the pot for me? Oh my goodness. Oh, no.

A potluck is where everyone brings a, like, someone cooks a main dish who's hosting, and then everyone brings food along with it. So like a side dish or a dessert. Okay. What is that called in the uk? Could be called the same thing. I've just never been to one. You could bring and share sort of thing maybe.

I dunno. It sounds great. Okay. Well we're gonna have to host a potluck at the testing pair. So I'm gonna get really American on you. There is a dish in Utah where I'm from, that's called funeral potatoes. They're like hash browns and chicken broth and cream, and then covered in cheese and potato chips and some.

It's like a heart attack in a casserole dish, and it's amazing. So that's what I'm bringing just because it's a perennial favorite, um, unless you can't do dairy or, uh, chicken broth. So I'm, I'm discounting vegetarians and people who can't do dairy. Um, so I would do bread, um, I like making bread, uh, chi butter in particular, so I'd probably make something of that elk.

I'm assuming that counts a slightly lovely. It does. I am, uh, an avid baker and I usually end up bringing, uh, cupcakes, but not like baked sale style cupcakes where they're just frosted, but like the fancy ones that have fillings and. Ooh, cupcake war style cupcakes.

Do love food. Maybe we'll just talk about that for the rest of the episode. Um. I've got a, I've got a heart and a cold because I, you know, depending on how much time I had, perhaps like, I, I might just grab a packet of something. I just want to say, I, I love Jaffa cakes and jaff cakes can, can stand alone as a side dish at a bring in shared dinner.

When people pick a pickety, if you dunno what those are, Rachel, or they are, they are, they're sold in the biscuit aisle biscuits in Europe, not, not in the states. And, uh, but they're actually, they're actually like legally distinct for tax reasons to biscuits as in fact cakes because you know, why not? And, uh, so it's a small circular soft cake, light cake, um, with a little jelly orange disc on top of it, and then a dark chocolate covering on the top.

And they are. Moish, I think is the word I would use. Um, I could eat a whole packet incredibly quickly. So those things, you know, if you, if you come over to Europe, they do sell, um, a variety of them in German. The supermarkets, I've been assured by Cassandra, which, so you're over in Germany for testing days.

There is a chance, in fact, if I make it to testing days, I'll bring them from Britain, which is better. But if, if, if it was gonna be a, a hot dish. I'm probably gonna go down the route of like melted cheese topped garlic bread. Ooh. And I'd make the garlic bread. I'll do it. I'll do it myself. I might even make the bread myself.

Why the hell not? 'cause that way you get to put more garlic, more butter, and more cheese. I love how we all just went straight for the carbs, like we're like.

Who eats, who pairs will load up on carbs. Love it. Well, thank you. That's, that concludes the banter. That would be a change for the better. I think that would be not a waste like, but yeah, it, it depends on your, I mean, maybe change for the batter. So, yeah, whatever. But trying desperately to clinging to a link to the, uh, theme of the episode.

I, listen, I, I proposed today that maybe we talk a little bit about existing in teams that perhaps there's a bit of discontent, perhaps listening. You are in a team and there's some people who are more than a little cheese stuff. Maybe their work isn't seen. Maybe they haven't been included. Maybe they've been given work too late.

It's incredibly urgent. Maybe people think they can do their job for them. Maybe there's historical context for why people have given up. So the proposal for today is, Hey friends, hey peers. What do you do when you walk into a team where it isn't all sunshines and rainbows? Well, the easy option is to walk straight back out.

I'm not saying we would. Is it easy? Have you seen the job market this year? Depends. Okay. Job market alone is like woo. Time to a lot. It depends because it's gonna be interesting. Yeah, it depends if the team's permanent sort of team or if it's a team that's transient, you know what I mean? A fixed team versus a temporary team.

But yes, uh, I get your point. If it's transient, then you would, if it's not transient, then you would need to actually try and change the culture, change the situation you're in for the better. So, yes. So I actually have a thing that I've been using the last time, the last couple times that I've changed teams, which is a WTF list.

What the freak? Um, there we go. So you join the team and you just start writing down all the stuff that absolutely confuses you about, like, why are they doing this kind of thing manually, or why, why are they. Coming into the office when you know, like only one person is taking an entire conference room and everyone else is at their desks.

You know, things like that. Or it could be that this person, one person is always asking for help and can't get through why. Can't get through what? Can't get through a thing. So just writing down all the things that confuse you or that. Maybe their code repos are terrible and you're like WTF, and then you as a person can see if there are any low hanging fruit that you can just solve for them, areas of pain that you can just solve.

And then once you've solved what you can, then you look at whether something is a technical challenge or a people challenge. If it can be solved by expertise, just not your expertise or whether it involves influence that. Needs to enact, enact change, like enable people to change. And then the technical challenge is usually fairly simple to solve.

Um, just find the right person. The people challenge is the adaptive challenges take a little bit more finesse and influence and I don't have a simple solution for that, but that's a model that I've used the last few times that I've changed teams and it's been pretty effective. And I've encouraged people who have joined after me to also compile their WTF list and.

Present it to the team and see what we can do to make things just suck a little bit less each time. Are there any gotchas that you would sort of have in those bits when, when presenting, or do you share WTF list with people? I assume it depends. So the first time that I did it, um, I had some very.

Sensitive egos on my team that I didn't wanna be like, well, this person doesn't collaborate. So I kept a list for myself and I shared my list with my manager and then shared a less, a lesser list. A smaller list with the team of like, here are things that don't involve egos, but why are we doing it this way?

Things like that. So you have to be sensitive. A good filter. A good filter for those things, which a bit of spatial awareness. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so that's what I've tried. I really like the transparency of that, if you are, especially if you're able to share it, because I feel like so often we end up kind of complaining to one or two trusted people, and then nothing ever.

Ever comes of it, um, except for like the trauma bonding that happens when you're complaining about the same stuff. But I think it opens up the capability of, of making those culture changes that are so, so hard to do. I've never heard it called. WTF, but I kind of get the pattern that you're talking about because I think I've tried similar wands, but I've just never given it a name.

But it was kind of more or less kind of defining things that were easy to change, that needed minimal support, was the way I framed it. Things that were gonna be hard to change. But could be changed with some support. And then things that were gonna be very hard to change, which was more the influencing other people.

But let's say you work in a place that's got fixed rules, HR across the whole business, that you know that to change that sort of policy or that rule or that thing would be possible, but isn't gonna be something you do by just instructing somebody. It's gonna be influence arguments, putting forward a, a case, an example, and so on, doing a trial.

And those sorts of things, but kind of going through it with teams of people when I've led them about asking them what are the challenges and kind of getting the feedback using kind of like retrospective techniques for want of a better word, to gather that. Ask the whys, like why is it important? Why is it matter?

Why are we doing it like that? Asking, making sure you got the history. 'cause I know I've tried to do things before where I didn't get the history and if I paused just a little bit to get it, I would've known that someone very similar. Did a similar thing and it burned to a crisp. And so everyone's got, uh, social scars and scars about that idea.

They don't necessarily disagree with it. They quite like the idea of it, but as a company or as a cultural thing, you're gonna get resistance left, right, and center from the delivery managers, from the devs, from this and that and the other because, oh, we tried something similar, uh, and didn't work. Or our app's so unique it can't do it here, and things like that.

And if you don't listen, you don't get the context, which means you can't frame things to the point I think Chris was making about framing things correctly in a way that can get you buy in to making that change. Because, I dunno about many of you, but it's commonplace that new managers come in with new ideas that want to try and influence change.

They want to put a spin on things to their world. And even if you're not the leader, if you are a leading personality, you often want to try and fix things and prove things. Uh, I know that wherever I go, whatever I do, I want to make things better. It's just who I am. So even if I'm not the boss, I'm kind of interested in seeing what the pain points are.

'cause a new face or a new person in a context often. Seize the actual pain rather than just the workarounds that people have applied. Because the amount of times I've gone, we do this like this, and I would go, why? There's a shorter route to doing that. So the new face is often quite good at spotting anomalies that the existing people have just.

Step accepted as business as usual for want of a better word. So, yeah, so that's kind of the model I, but it's pretty much exactly the same thing you are talking about, just different framing to it. I think as far as the influence goes, the people challenges, um, there are a couple of resources that I really love.

Uh, they both come out of. Well, one is everyone can lead and the other is your leadership edge, and both books are written by Ed O'Malley who came from the Kansas Leadership Center because why not? We were talking about the Midwest before we started recording and yeah, they have great stuff, but it, they talk about.

Adaptive challenges, those people challenges and how to both get your context and, uh, get into like speaking to loss if we've tried this before, have we tried this in this way that will also engage more people or things like that. Um, so those are two books that I highly recommend both by Ed O'Malley.

You just look 'em up. I'll make sure that I take those down and put them in the show notes for the, uh, listeners. That was, that's really, really good to share the resources. I was thinking about coming back to one of the things Tara said about the bonds we make with our colleagues when we've got the shared trauma.

Those bonds are actually like legit, aren't they? Like, they're like, there are people that I'm still friends with and we went, you know, we were in the trenches. We were doing these horrible vial things. And, and that's great. And, but you can get, that can be a bit of a trap sometimes, can't it? It can be a bit of a, like, it's a safe space.

I've cut my closure because we went and had a coffee and had a bitch about person X process y product ed. And that's, that's that, yeah, that's, it's kind of, it's a short term. Fix. And it's that thing that we have to sort of resolve that for now, but it's not a sustainable fix ever, is it? And, and I sort of think about when I've got into those close personal relationships and I'm still friends with people that I've been in those situations with, but retrospect is, is an interesting thing that Russell brought up.

And he like, what could we have done differently? Did I feel empowered? Did I speak with the right people? What could I have tried in. It's not, I'm not in a position of regret when it comes to those things, but it does sort of make me wonder, would the day have been less rubbish each day if somehow there'd been less of a, an acceptance of how it is and doing stuff.

But that's, that comes sort of laced into things we talked about sort of psychological psychosocial. Safety in the workplace? Do we feel empowered to speak up? What happens when people do? Have you worked in places where people have tried to change stuff and then been blamed quietly, moved out, things like that.

It's, it's a really interesting dynamic 'cause working in a place of fear, which I'm, I'm reading that generationally speaking the sort of younger workforce than, than the roofers. There's Pete behind the curtain for the listeners. We we're, we're not in you like, you know, in our twenties, sadly anymore, but I know our voices sound well-reasoned and youthful.

But anyway, I, I sort of read the other day that they're saying that, that this is a generation of cling to your jobs because of the, the job market, 'cause of the change because. It's better to be be employed than unemployed. Rather than improve yourself, improve your brand, make a change of where things are.

It's better just to be there, get through the crap, and maybe somehow you'll be seen and rewarded, and that doesn't feel like a culture that's gonna breed. People looking for the art of the possible change and embracing cultural improvements and continuous improvements. And so therefore it feels even more incumbent upon us to set a standard talk about how share methods not, not just these wonderful transparent things that we can do to unlock finding out why a bit of discovery and things, but.

What can I do about that? I, I think for me, it's always been really important to, to walk away from those conversations with an action item. Like it's not in my purview to change. It's not something I can change, but when it is, what are we gonna do about it and who do I need to involve? What are the stakeholders, et cetera.

So it's almost like treating it like a, like a feature or a bug that has come across your desk. And I go through that same kind of process of like, okay, but now what coming out with tangible things is always a better outcome. Like even if you go, and as Chris was saying, and you're like talking to a friend and sharing a problem and bouncing ideas is a better way than just complaining.

The answer to your point are it could well be. There isn't anything we can do. It could be some, there is something we can do. It could be all sorts of different things, but you're better off trying to see what's possible, what sort of feedback you can get, and what you can actually kind of come out as an action.

And then as you said, that action could be, I'm gonna try to not let this infect impact me, uh, or I'm gonna speak to my line manager about this, or. I am gonna feed back on the next staff survey. These things impact me. 'cause if enough people do this, maybe there will be organizational change. I'm going to speak to a union about it if you're unionized, and so on and so forth.

But, you know, sitting on your hands is probably the expression I'd use. You've got to do something. 'cause it'll just ruminate, ruminate, ruminate. And it could be an active choice to do nothing, but it has to be active. That's the thing that makes the difference. Otherwise, it's just completely, I love that moan session all the time.

But you've got to accept it. You've got to have a moment to complain about it. You can try and make it a little less painful. It doesn't mean you can stop it being painful to you, whatever's going on. It could be trust of a manager micromanaging you. You can do a lot to try and influence them, but you can't probably stop them being a micromanager, uh, without grievance processes and all sorts of complexities.

But you can try and influence which bit they're looking after, which bits you take ownership of. You can try and give them candid feedback that you work best. With a different style. It doesn't mean they're gonna listen. And that could also be frustrating 'cause that winds me up more than anything else.

People not listening. But if you don't try, that also winds me up. So personally, it's like the ability to try and influence change is far more valuable to me than to succeeding. Um, to your point about sort of, um, people accepting where they are, you can accept where you are and still try and make change.

Um, you know, you don't have to right someone, say something offensive to you and slap them in the face. Um, there's more diplomatic ways of dealing with conflict, challenging policies and all those sorts of things, but I kind of brought up with a mantra that if you do nothing, then don't expect anything to change.

So you're just accepting it and that's, that can be a valid to do nothing and accept it, but you have to accept it to do nothing and then keep moaning about the same thing or complaining about the same thing is frustrating. But again, going back to the earlier thing, there's some things that you have little control over.

The classic one of late that I keep coming back to is, uh, office working. Where everyone went remote for COVID and then there's been a big drive for lots of companies to drive towards. You must come into the office now. Lots of people speak up. You can influence that to a degree, but ultimately someone somewhere is sitting in a chair saying, I want X.

So, and it's often not your line manager, it's often not the people that you have influence over. It's often outside of that, and you've got two options. Accept it. Give feedback on it. Talk about the disruption of it, give examples of why it's not a good idea or, and the other option is vote with your feet.

A lot of people don't, which case you have to learn to accept it. Or the other option is you willfully don't accept it, but then you have to wait until you get, might get disciplined, you know, you don't go to the office, but at some point someone might tell you off for that. They may not disagree with what you're doing, but if there's a rule of play at work, you might get told off.

So you have to accept that if you complain about it and that's the rules and things like that, it's, it's hard, but sometimes you have to follow the process. Uh, to a degree. But anyway, I rambled. It's a lot, it's a lot to unpack there, isn't there? Sorry. 'cause there's, there's, there's safety. There's safety, there's navigating a workplace, there's consequences, there's sharing, there's actions and, and what the consequences to those actions or those not actions might be, there's, there's stuff around protecting your peace.

'cause you might not be in a place where actions actually are useful. There are, the world is. Wildly different place, every single place you go into. Um, and yeah, there's, there's so many good points that you draw in there. Um, I just, ah, avoid like, there's just no, but there's no, but there's no, there's, I mean, ultimately you're coming in as there's lots of interesting and good, useful tips and tricks, but it's, it's kind of, it's a context thing, right?

Because depends, yeah. Where you are at. Where your positioning is, where the company's at, what their culture is at, what their constraints are at, like, navigating that and, and the discovery of uncovering what is in that culture, what is behind those decisions, that positioning why people are feeling the way that they are, why you feel the way that you do, and all of that, all of those bits feed into what you do.

So there's an awful lot of resilience required in a human who's just discovering a lot of things. I do think it's, it's an attitude thing. It's all about taking control of your own destiny and whether that is acceptance in the moment and preparing yourself for something else, or whether that's making changes, stating that you want change, it's all, it is very empowering to me to.

Realize that I have agency in that and can choose to stay in a situation, even if I don't really have a choice to say, but this is what is best for me now. This is what is best for my family right now that I have job stability. Even if it, it's a reframing, if you can frame it as this is my choice and this is what I'm going to do for now.

Even if it's grin and bear, it just that. That changes a lot of things for me. It's often not easy, is it? That's the other things with that, it's no. Yeah. Damned if you do, damned if you don't type model to this sort of thing. Well, because both are hard, especially if you have that personality type of being like a perfectionist or a fixer.

Like you're more drawn to that side of things and I think. Probably a lot of us that are in the testing space are in that bucket. Yep. Um, and so learning to be like, okay, this is not as high a priority as I thought, or being able to go to a manager or somebody that works under us and say, this is, this is what I'm struggling with.

Help me reframe it or what can you take off my plate or any of those things to be like, this doesn't get fixed. I'm gonna burn out real quick. That's, that's an ally thing there as well. Isn't there People you can share with? And I, I don't, I dunno about how this works for you. I feel incredibly, life is easy when I'm advocating for somebody else than for me.

Like, oh yeah. Thousand, thousand percent. I got, I got, I actually got called out for this at, at a Eurostar conference one year by Ana, because I was, I was complaining about something to do with, with the AV and I wasn't doing anything about it. And the minute somebody else was having a problem, or I went over, went straight over to the AV V person, sort out, she was like, she's like, you're such a weird and complex human.

Stop being so British and just sort your own stuff. But it's true. She was right. It's, it is much easier to be an advocate. Personally, it's much easier to be an advocate, other people. As a leader, I find fighting for other causes harder, easier. Sorry, than fighting for my own self here. Take my advice. I'm not using it.

Yeah, I'm in a similar boat a lot of the time, but one thing that I did do. Okay, I'm going to shamelessly brag about my shameless channel. So, at work, uh, in Utah, we have a very humble state of mind for the residents who live here. And, um, it can, in my opinion, go a little bit too far into where they will not talk about anything positive about themselves in a public forum.

So I decided that I was gonna be a bull in a China shop and create a channel where that is exactly what people do. It's called shameless. You are expected to shamelessly brag, so people throw in there all sorts of things about the cool stuff that they're doing on their teams or in their personal lives.

Uh, we had a woman. Competing for a spot on an Olympic on on the Olympics team for the speed skating. And so that was like all over the channel. Some people post when they're helping out, like leading a girl's camping trip or whatever, uh, for at risk youth. So it's just really cool and vibrant and gives people a way to change the.

Culture and see what other people are doing really around them. Sounds good. I love that. I have a, uh, I have a boss. Hi Jen. She loves to have, um, what's good Wednesday. So even if we don't have our meeting on Wednesday, we end up bumping it up or down the week. She's like, okay, we have to take a minute.

Before we do anything else, tell me what's good. And so it's our own little way of being like, okay, work might suck, but here's this really cool thing that happened, or Here's this thing that I finally finished and I'm so glad to be done with this task, or whatever is good for you that day to help spin that positive and put a smile on your face before we get into all the other stuff.

I think sort of positive affirmations and shouting about your successes is something. I've seen certainly within our communities that we've not been the greatest advocate for. There's always some exceptions, but I think, um, it's possibly by our training, um, where we are about finding problems or opportunities maybe, uh, should reframe it.

But we are often seen in a negative light, so we start treating ourselves in a negative light, which is kind of a affirmation circle where negativity sort of goes on and on and on. Obviously. It's not the, there's exceptions to that and so on and so forth. But I think there's a lot more sort of negative thinking patterns and behavioral patterns within the test community than with say, the creative communities out there.

'cause we don't see ourselves as creative, even though a lot of what we do is still quite creative. It's just framed as finding fault rather than supporting brilliance is a different way. So we, we get trapped in our own sort of negative spirals for want of a better word. Do you feel like, uh, with, with the memes and the way that people look at QA in general as being kind of the, the naysayers and the people that break software, that that kind of becomes the way you eventually look at your job or you look at yourself regardless of if that's where you started?

I think, um, a lot of that presentation. Seeps into a lot of individuals and the more it seeps into them, the more reaffirming it is. Um, I don't think it gets everywhere and every one. I think some people challenge it, which is really positive, but it's the natural, the joke's, even at work, they're not meant to be horrible and offensive.

They're like, oh, you found fault again. Oh, oh, you found another book? Oh, don't let the test look at it before it goes out. 'cause they'll find problems. Those little. Things aren't meant to be horrible. They aren't meant to be catastrophic, but they layer upon layer upon layer, um, that impact, I think the psyche, for want of a better word, of a lot of the test community that starts thinking of things as in a bit more negatively than others.

I don't think we're all negative, don't get me wrong, but I think it just adds a little extra reinforcement that drives us slightly as the needle towards that negative perspective on. Our roles, our jobs, that then compounds it with problems and other things. We're often also in a group, let's say development team, we are the one or two voices outta the seven.

So even when we do try and challenge and things like that, often the allies are not as natural for us. They exist still and the developers can often be great allies, but there, there's often sometimes a little bit more friction to get. People on side, depending on the culture. Again, depending on the context.

I've worked in teams where the devs with more advocates of testing than the testers, but in the majority of times it's not always like that. The culture's definitely changes. It's in different teams, it is different, but I would say that on the law of averages, it averages more towards negativity, fighting a little bit harder, feeling the victim, feeling like you are a minority.

Because often you are, but it doesn't mean you haven't got allies in the community yet. And, and just underappreciated. Yeah. Overworked and underappreciated. If you're getting little microaggressions that are, you know, even if they started off as a joke, but now you're a little tired and now you're a little burnout.

I've heard that joke every release. Thank you very much. Yeah. Exactly. No, it's, there's no, it'll wear you down. They do drive that negativity. And then with all the other worldly problems that come into existence about process systems, businesses, it makes it a little bit more challenging to deal with change, to deal with friction potentially for people in these sorts of roles.

Um, because you've, you've seen the negative, the world around you seen negative, so raising problems, well, that's just reinforcing the issue, isn't it? But I do think if you wanna see change, then you, if you wanna see improvement in quality, you don't go, oh, I found a bug. I'll just hide it. They don't really want to know about No, they do.

That's really why they're paying you. They're making jokes. They're kind of pretending these things and they're saying these things, but they actually do value what you do. They're just terrible at articulating it. Virtually every developer I've met doesn't wanna release Boogie software 'cause it represents them.

We're very human, aren't we? That's the problem. We're very fallible and very human. And we're not always particularly logical. No. So messy. Yes. Who would be human? Eh? Bring on the ai. No, don't. People don't. I take that back, Russell. I think. When, when I start to feel like my team is getting a little bit down on me or what I offer, I try to remind them that it's better when I find it than like pulling our production to a, to a halt.

Um, and then that kind of. Can help shift things of like, we wanna find things earlier, like you said, Russell, we do want, you do wanna present your stuff in the best light possible. And it's better when I find it than when our customers do or when our users do. And that has helped reset things a few times when I just remind them that we're all on the same team.

It doesn't need to be adversarial in anything more than a joking fashion like. Sanitizer inputs people. I think there was one thing we've mentioned a little bit, which is leaders, line managers, being supportive of your people, asking them what's not, what's the trouble? Is what, what changes? Causing them friction.

What, what is hurting? What would they do if they were in your position? You know, open questions like that to show that you're listening, that you care. Making sure that if someone does pass on feedback about something that's not working at a slightly larger level, guess you as leader may not be able to change it, but pass on the feedback, don't be the death of it, I think is the best way I can do it.

You're much more of an advocate. If I use the example of office working, if 10 people complain to me, but an office working and I know I'm not likely to change it. I don't just go absorb it all. 'cause that then actually is harder on me as a leader. I've got to take that on. That weight is on my shoulders then.

But you've got to then speak to the people that influence. You've got to feed that back to the HR channels. So you've got to write a, speak to some other managers. Even write, write a reason why it's gonna be more impactful for your team than is others. My case, for example, I've got teams that are in six different offices, so coming together to work in a one office isn't a benefit because they've got no actual.

Teammates in the same office as them. They've got people that do the same job. So there's community theoretical benefit, but this massive benefit of, oh, well you can sit and work with people. It's like, no one's in Leeds, one's in Manchester, one's in Blackpool. I can't. So it's kind of one of those things.

So it's, it's giving framing to it, giving a voice to making sure that information's passed on. Further up the chain, it goes the same. You are there to represent and support everyone. Um, so make sure that if you do get feedback, you do share it, you do advocate for it. You may not agree with it all, but it's still someone that you represents feedback.

It's a problem they're having impact they're having. So you should be a good advocate for them regardless of it's three chains below you or uh, anywhere else. Your job is to kind of help make sure your people are heard. Don't try and do everything yourself is another thing. You know there are, you have a certain amount of bandwidth, there are hills that you shouldn't die on.

Pick and choose things. Try and read the room, test the wall to push some doors as a risk assessment. Or someone, some, someone, someone that's desperate to try and make. Change and make positive bits. Like I was, I was reminded the other day about the beginning of, of Ted Lasso and um, you know, he's come in as a American football coach taking on a, an English football team, and you know that he's a, he's a laughing stock and he hasn't got any of the players believing in him.

And he gets a suggestion box and people just mostly tell him that he's a. An exploitative and then an exploitative, and then an exploitative, then an exploitative. But one person puts a suggestion in saying the shower pressure's rubbish. The wa the water pressure and the shower's rubbish and there's all, all this sort of stuff goes, goes by after match the gaps that he smashed.

It's awful. He goes in bad mood, goes and has a shower. Water pressure's good, and he is just, there's just a little, little switch. Ah, it, it might not be a big win. It makes a cultural shift to say that I was able to complain about something to someone who heard me and we move forward. It's not all of the things.

It's not dramatic. You can't boil the ocean or whatever those things are, but there are ways and means that you can bring people on that journey with you. And I think that's a really important thing to do. 'cause being a change agent isn't being an individual doing everything by themselves. And if you are, you are probably setting yourself up to fail.

Uh, I, I know that one of the things that I have historically struggled with at many of the places that I have been including outside of tech, has always been kind of managing up, right? When you're low on the, the totem pole, when you are that new, new person on a team and you have your WTF list, yes, I would love to knock some of these things off, and some of them might be with minimal support.

Now, how do I get people to support and then be accountable for those changes? Right. Even when I've been at the top of the food chain, the accountability seems to be one of the hardest things. It's like if, if just the, the team, the team are going around trying to fix everything themselves. I worked in a company where they.

The software team, were trying to be so agile, so efficient, so iterative, but we were downstream of an incredibly rigid and linear way of working that it didn't matter how agile and lean and, and perfect we were, we were still part of a big machine. That context was missing and everyone was going, we just need to be more agile.

We need to be more Spotify. We were making oscilloscopes people. We didn't need to be more. Spotify and our context and our constraints were different and, and just, just making ourselves wonderfully refined and optimized was never going to fix things. And if anything, it was going to irritate us even more because we, we couldn't do any more in our own little kingdom.

I can't get the idea of oscilloscopes playing music outta my head now being more Spotify. Oh, well, oscilloscopes, of course, waveforms. You can see all the music my friend. Just remember your old Windows media player and all the Oh, good old days. Crazy beats. You know, you're right. And there's, there's a lot of system thinking, and it's about not trying to optimize one part of the process, but actually thinking about the whole system.

And let's face it, testing is. Only a small part of a whole system. Valuable software is the ultimate goal. Um, you know, it has some value to someone who's paying for it, be it a customer at the end of the day, be it kind of the businesses itself, some value, um, to somebody that matters. So you've gotta think of it, the whole system.

And yeah, you can optimize things inside that, but a lot of the time the constraints are outside of the immediate task you are doing. So if you just focus on the narrow. You impact the wider, but going back to our earlier points, you can't change everything from every position, if that makes sense. So whilst.

Do look to optimize. You've just gotta think of the wider optimization and the feedback of where your optimizations make sense. Like you can make your, um, automation run in 10 minutes, great, but you're still gonna release every three months. You, you go, well, what's the value? And the value is still faster feedback.

We know the build's broken faster. It still does give value. It's just not gonna impact your release cycle if that's what you were trying to do. It might in the future. It lays the foundations for it. It doesn't equal directly that you're gonna release every day or do continuous delivery because you actually need other stakeholders engaged.

Involved, trusting, but it could be a building block. I like the idea of building blocks. That gives me a nice visual. When you think about talking about shifting changes that might seem so incredibly massive, like changing an in complete culture of a company or a team. That's a hard undertaking, but I could change this tiny process here, and if that works really well, then maybe the next process will go a little bit better, and then maybe somebody will get excited by that small win and think, what can I do to help?

Right. Exactly that. And it's like, oh, the opportunities it can open. It's like, oh, well if you can do that, then maybe we can do this, or, I didn't think that was possible. So maybe. This other thing I didn't think was impossible was, and it starts and it can be be, as Chris said, the shower, a little thing about, it's annoying, it's frustrating.

It could be a check that you have to get done that doesn't really have any point these days. 'cause the person just goes, yeah, tick without even looking at it. But that's the process. So you know, by changing that, and that could actually cause a three hour delay. Because it's one person who's fixed, who's in the US for example, and you are in the uk.

So they come online at 3:00 PM your time and so on and so forth. But by removing that one little. Check tick on a list of checklists. You could do that, and it could be by automating it, a conversation with them. There's so many ways of doing it, but just that little bit less friction can can solve. It won't solve the world.

And this is the thing, it's about expectation management, but it can be that, oh, I didn't think anyone ever changed that. I never thought Dave would release this check. But actually by talking to Dave, by explaining what it is, the value and the impact it's having and asking. You know, is there any other way of doing it and actually getting an answer that, oh yeah, if you put these automated checks in, all I ever do is look for them.

Okay, well tell you what. How about we send you a report and then you tell us? 'cause we're not gonna release for three days afterwards anyway, so you can check for three days and if there's a problem and there's three days, you tell us, yeah, it's fine by me. It's odd how you can get acceptance by people sometimes from the most weird things that you didn't think was possible.

And also the opposite's true. Uh, some things you think should be really easy to change have knowingly hard obstacles that have no rhyme or reason. So true. I have a dev whose policy is, if you're gonna make me do this more than three times, I'm gonna automate it. So our build process. Is so automated, you move a Jira ticket and it creates the PR for you.

'cause he was tired of, he was tired of doing that. Um, it's incredible. But we, we try to celebrate all those little small wins and, but he raises the flag of like, no, this is annoying. I have to push too many buttons. Stop it. We're gonna fix that. That's lovely. Dependability. I'm, I'm, I'm here for it. I will. I will throw the, the devil's advocate moment in that is I have been the new person on teams like that and none of that thing is documented or written down and my WTF list is so long 'cause I don't know what just happened.

That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. People that do that often are also the, don't really want to guides to it as well. It just works. Why do you need to know why? Exactly. Or they get a new job or go on vacation or God forbid, get sick and all of a sudden everything's broken and no one knows what's happening.

Yeah, we've made a whole episode once about AI stuff. It's very sad. No AI in all of this conversation.

I guess I just, there's always hope. There's always hope, uh, whether that's. Acceptance in yourself that things won't change because of you, or that you can light a spark, that you can be the spark for change and you're not alone. There are people around you who will trauma, trauma bond with you or help make real change.

That's a very good point. I was gonna end on one point, but yeah, it goes very nicely with that one really, which is there's um, there's um, a theory, there's a book called Let Them. Which is about sort of encouraging people to try and stop, um, controlling others and instead focusing on their own happiness, their own kind of goals themselves a little bit more.

So let like people flow over you, don't let what they do and what they control impact you. Lovely, um, thing to say, harder to act on as always, like lots of these things, but that's, it's certainly something that's interesting in, in trying to understand and letting things flow over you. Some things. And understanding what you can change and so on.

But on that note. We should probably end our episode 'cause we can go on and on and on and on and on. And anyone who's listened to many of our podcasts knows I certainly can. So I will close it here and say thank you very much for joining us, uh, listeners. Uh, and also say thank you to our, our team and our peers today to thank you, Rachel, Tara.

Chris, if you want to reach out to us, you want to tell us any of your wins, any of your, um, things you wanna celebrate, Vicky Self. Know, feel free if you wanna tell us a little bit about kind of the changes you're having to deal with, things like that, ideas or topics, anything, just reach out to us at, contact us@testingpeers.com if you also want to.

We are still in our Testing Peers 2026 conference season. If you listen to this before the 12th of March, there you go, then feel free to check out the website. Uh, testing peers com.com. Uh, and. If you want to come along to Nottingham in the UK a whole day conference, we would love to see as many of you as possible there.

I think Tara's joining us all the way over from America, so she has to now send it online. I know. So once again, thank you all for listening. Uh, hope it's been useful to you, and do reach out if you want to talk. For now, it's goodbye from the testing peers. Goodbye.